Penalties for Hiring Illegal Aliens Pass Court Test

A federal appeals court Friday upheld the constitutionality of sanctions on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens, but the court said “troubling” questions remain about how to enforce the law.

In the first appellate court review of the 1986 immigration reform law’s employer penalty provisions, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a general constitutional challenge to the statute and also upheld many of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s procedures for enforcing it.

However, in a case involving an El Cajon furniture plant, which hired several illegal aliens, the court raised questions about how quickly companies must fire an employee once employers are notified that the worker is not in the country legally.

Fined for 6 Violations

In this case, Mester Manufacturing Co. was fined $3,000 for six violations, one of which was the company’s continued employment of a worker, Miguel Castel-Garcia, for two weeks after receiving notice from the INS that he was not authorized to work in the United States.

The citation “raises a troubling question,” said Judge Robert R. Beezer, writing for the three-judge panel. “When must an employer terminate an employee upon learning that he or she is unauthorized to work in the United States. . . . Was Mester required to fire Castel-Garcia the very day it received the citation? Or should the company have been allowed a reasonable period of time in which to allow Castel-Garcia to wind up his employment? The statute does not answer these questions.”

As written, the court said, the statute would allow the INS to notify a company at 11:55 a.m. that one of its employees was unauthorized and seek sanctions five minutes later.

Moreover, since the INS has expressed a desire to proceed on a case-by-case basis, it will be up to the court to work through such issues in future litigation unless new laws or regulations are passed to deal with the uncertainty, Beezer said, joined by Judges Cecil F. Poole and Stephen S. Trott.

In this case, the court deferred to the previous decision of an administrative law judge, who had held that a fine for the two-week delay in firing Castel-Garcia was warranted.

The court rejected Mester’s argument that the immigration reform law is unconstitutional because it was presented to the President for signature after Congress adjourned. The court held that a delay in presenting the bill for signature did not remove the President’s opportunity to consider the legislation.

INS spokesman Joe Flanders said the agency’s western region, which includes California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and Guam, has issued about 550 fines totaling $2.8 million since the employer sanctions provisions went into full effect in June, 1988.

“Certainly we are pleased to hear that they (the court) upheld the legality of employer sanctions, which is what we consider the heart and soul and meat of the immigration control act,” Flanders said.

Challenges Planned

But Francisco Garcia, spokesman for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said more substantive constitutional challenges to the sanctions are still ahead.

A class-action lawsuit pending in Northern California seeks to establish, among other things, that INS visits to factory work floors and searches of documents beyond basic employee verification forms without a warrant violate the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches.

“It sounds like they have upheld the constitutional challenge on its face,” he said of Friday’s decision, “which isn’t surprising because no federal court is going to throw out an entire body of law based on what appear to be technical violations.”

“It still leaves unclear all the other constitutional questions of warrants, notice and what are the limits of INS enforcement power in this area. (The law) does not give the INS an additional club to hold over the heads of employers.”